Why Are There So Many Different Types of Freemasonry?

A man wrote to me last month convinced he had found three separate secret societies in his own city, when in fact he had found one fraternity organised in three different ways. The confusion is understandable and it stops a fair number of curious men before they ever reach a lodge door, so it is worth untangling properly.

Freemasonry is not one worldwide organisation with a head office. It is a family of independent Grand Lodges, each sovereign in its own territory, each recognising the others through a web of mutual agreements. Understanding that single fact removes most of the fog.

§The Grand Lodge is the sovereign body

Every regular lodge sits under a Grand Lodge, usually organised by state, province or country. The United Grand Lodge of England, whose own account of the fraternity is worth reading at ugle.org.uk, is one of the oldest and most widely recognised, but it has no authority over lodges in Ohio or Ontario. Each Grand Lodge sets its own dues, its own ritual wording within broad limits, and its own rules on who may petition. That is why one jurisdiction may differ from its neighbour on small points of practice while still being entirely regular.

§Craft Freemasonry is the foundation everyone shares

Whatever else exists on top, every Freemason starts in the same place: a Craft or Blue Lodge, working through the three degrees described in The Three Degrees of Freemasonry. This is the base of the whole structure and it is the only part that is required. Nobody has to go further than this to be a full member in good standing.

§Appendant bodies are optional extensions

Once a man is a Master Mason he becomes eligible, if he chooses, to join further organisations built on the Craft foundation. These are called appendant bodies and none of them is compulsory.

• Royal Arch Masonry, often described as a completion of the third degree story
• The Scottish Rite, a series of further degrees run in two main councils in the United States
• The York Rite, a grouping of separate bodies including Royal Arch, Cryptic and Templar orders
• The Shrine, a fraternal and charitable body known for its hospitals and its public visibility

Each has its own membership fee, its own calendar and its own culture. A man can be perfectly content spending his entire Masonic life in the Craft alone, and a great many are.

§Regular and irregular Freemasonry

Recognition matters more than most beginners realise. Grand Lodges extend mutual recognition to one another based on shared standards, and a body calling itself Masonic without that recognition is described as irregular, sometimes clandestine. Joining an unrecognised body can quietly close doors elsewhere for the rest of a man's life, since regular lodges will not admit a visitor from one. The safest check before you petition anywhere is whether the lodge appears on your Grand Lodge's own published directory.

Regularity is not snobbery. It is the thread that lets a Mason from Melbourne walk into a lodge in Manchester and be recognised as a brother on sight.

§Prince Hall Freemasonry

In the United States, Prince Hall Freemasonry traces its lineage to Prince Hall, a Black abolitionist initiated into a military lodge in 1775 who went on to found a lodge of his own after being refused entry elsewhere. Prince Hall Grand Lodges are fully regular and today enjoy mutual recognition with most mainstream Grand Lodges across the country, following decades of overdue progress. The history is covered fairly at Wikipedia's entry on Prince Hall Freemasonry and it is worth an evening's reading for anyone curious about how the fraternity has actually behaved, warts and all, over its history.

§Why none of this should slow you down

Every man who has ever asked me about types of Freemasonry has been, without exception, still deciding whether to walk into his first lodge. That decision does not require any of the above. It requires one regular lodge, one email to its secretary, and one visit. The rest of the structure is scenery you will learn as you go, the way a new employee learns an org chart over months rather than on day one.

§How to talk about this with a curious relative

Family members often stumble into the same confusion you once had, hearing about a Grand Lodge, a Shrine event and a temple dinner and assuming three separate groups are involved. The simplest explanation that tends to land is the tree analogy: the Craft lodge is the trunk, appendant bodies are branches, and every branch still draws from the same root. Nobody needs a branch to have a healthy tree.

It also helps to point out that membership in any appendant body is entirely a personal choice made years after joining, never a condition of joining in the first place. A relative worried that you are about to disappear into an ever expanding list of commitments can be reassured that the Craft alone, described in How to Join a Masonic Lodge, is a complete and sufficient Masonic life on its own.

§How jurisdictions differ without being irregular

Two regular Grand Lodges can look surprisingly different from the outside. One jurisdiction might require a longer waiting period between degrees, another might allow candidates to move through in a matter of weeks. One might permit affiliation from a foreign jurisdiction with minimal paperwork, another might require a formal demit and a fresh petition. None of this is a sign that either jurisdiction is doing it wrong. Freemasonry has never been centrally governed, and that decentralisation is a feature that has kept it adaptable across more than three centuries and dozens of countries.

If you plan to move cities or countries during your Masonic life, it is worth asking your lodge secretary early how affiliation or a certificate of good standing works in your jurisdiction, since the process is straightforward but does involve paperwork that is easier to start while everyone still remembers you.

If the differences between individual lodges are what actually worry you, Are All Masonic Lodges the Same? is the more useful read, and the lodge scorecard will help you compare the ones near you.

Learn the shape of the fraternity slowly, over years, the way most Masons do. For now, focus on How to Join a Masonic Lodge and leave the alphabet soup for later.

§A word on cost across the different bodies

Each appendant body carries its own separate joining fee and dues, entirely apart from your Craft lodge dues. A man who joins the Craft, then the Scottish Rite, then the Shrine, is effectively paying three separate memberships, each with its own calendar of events. None of this is hidden, and no lodge will pressure a new candidate to join anything beyond the Craft. If cost is on your mind at all, work out your Craft budget first using How Much Does It Cost to Become a Freemason? and treat every appendant body as a later, entirely optional decision.

It is also worth knowing that different jurisdictions recognise different appendant bodies as legitimate extensions of the Craft, and a body considered entirely normal in one country may be unfamiliar or even unknown in another. This is simply geography and history at work, not a sign that anything irregular is going on.